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BITS Pilani partners industry to set up semiconductor lab

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CIOL Bureau
New Update

BANGALORE: In what would be the first of its kind research center in India, BITS Pilani in collaboration with New York based Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) would be setting up an applied research lab in Bangalore with active support from the Indian Semiconductor Association (ISA).






According to the institutes, the center to be called the BITS-RIT APEX (Applied research and professional Excellence) center would focus on cutting edge semi-conductor research and would also have basic and advanced courses. BITS is investing around Rs 1.5 crore into the center, which would come up in July.





Elaborating on the initiative, BITS-Pilani director Prof Maheshwari said, "An industry-academia JV such as this would definitely help the semi-conductor industry where the rate of change of technology keeps changing. Moore's law poses a problem in this sense and so education and training has to be in step with the industry demand." The lab would be an extension of the BITS' existing Oyster's Lab or OLAB.





Prof Maheshwari also hoped that the APEX center would help the industry to face the problem of shortage of people for high-end work such as analog and reference design. RIT on its part proposes to set up an international RF-Analog research facility as part of the center. RIT RF/Analog/Mixed signal lab director Dr Mukund said, "There is a distinct lack of expertise in the analog and RF domain in India and this poses a big bottleneck for companies to undertake high value work here. The Bangalore center will foster interaction between universities, affiliate companies and RIT researchers."





Some of the courses that would be offered at the center include VLSI design, software testing, technical writing, embedded software development and biotechnology. BITS will award credits for the courses and eventually certification.





The center would be open to corporate sponsorship and affiliation. Dr Mukund said that most of the research would be motivated by the industry. ISA president Rajendra Khare commented that ISA would also look at working out more such arrangements with universities across India.








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